DeLorean Playtime! Yay!

PHYSICAL AND MENTAL STATE: I have truly… utterly… hit the wall. My threshold for Back to the Future has been reached.

Hello, Theoretical Newcomer to Our Website. If you weren’t aware, the premise of our little experiment is that everybody has to watch the same movie once per every week of 2013 and monitor how it affects them. I’ve been assigned Back to the Future, and even though I love it, it’s October, dammit. I typically just pick an aspect of the movie to focus on and write up a bunch of somewhat readable articles, but this late in the year, I am completely drained. This is no joke… I tried to start the movie at 12:30am. I spent almost two hours just attempting to push play, and finding myself completely unable.

A face I have never before made at the thought of Back to the Future.

I could not think of a snappy topic to occupy my mind while watching. I was not open to casually discovering anything new about the film. I did not even want to blankly stare it. I felt hollow. Dejected. Where was the childlike sense of wonder I once had for this amazing time travel adventure?

That’s when it hit me… I had to watch it like a kid again. Sing along with Huey, make “vroom” noises with my mouth, and most importantly… round up some props.

Item One: model DeLorean.

Item Two: dinner plate steering wheel.

Item Three: flux capacitor app (doubles as a temporal display).

Item Four: clock tower flyer.

Item Five: guitar simulator.

Item Six: Bantha stand-in for Einstein.

After documenting my selection of playtime accessories, I put away all notebooks, cameras, or video recorders. While I typically take notes during my viewings, today was all about play.

Some of the more entertaining things I fondly recall:

If you don’t own a giant amplifier, turning imaginary knobs on a bookshelf will suffice.

That “Save the Clock Tower” flyer is crumpled all to hell by the end of the film. Why don’t they take better care of it?

Their flyer.

My flyer.

Please don’t think I’m about to go on some rant about how we should all watch movies this way, with our hearts instead of our minds or some other such bullshit. This was literally about finding any way to make Back to the Future interesting to me again. It worked, it was surprisingly fun, and that’s that.

About Cinemanaut Bill

Bill Gray grew up in Milton, NH, intensely analyzing and memorizing every single movie his parents would let him watch (so, Disney). Upon escape, he attended the University of Maine at Farmington as a writing major. Somehow, he ended up in Portland, ME as a paid video editor and an unpaid comedian. He currently lives with fellow Cinemanaut Becca, his girlfriend of 9 years, and they will be constantly fighting for Blu-Ray player use. He is so very done watching Top Gun, which he watched once every week of 2012. He loves BACK TO THE FUTURE.